Tertullian: An Introduction – David Bercot - Anabaptist Perspectives Ep. 105

Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. We’re here with David Bercot. Thanks again for doing this. I think this is - I don’t know - our sixth episode together, or something. It’s always fun. I enjoy doing it. This is great though. Like honestly. You are well known for having written a lot of books about early church history, early church fathers, and we’ve never done episodes on that, so today we want to do I guess more of a profile of an early church figure. Tertullian. So how do we even know about him? What writings do we have about him? How do we even know he existed? He left a large volume of writings. This is volume three of the Ante- Nicene Fathers. Okay, this is I mean small print. This is all Tertullian plus there’s another quarter volume in addition to this one. Okay, so we’ve got lots of his writing.

So 01:06 - if we knew nothing else (and actually we don’t know a whole lot else) we’ve got his writings. They speak for who he is. He’s one of those figures we don’t have to be guessing about. Well can you give us a bit of an overview of his life? Just kind of a broad stroke picture of his life? Yeah, it will be very narrow because unlike some of the others, we have very little either autobiographical or biographical information on him. In his writings he says things that you know this guy was not raised a Christian because he talks about “in my past when… ” this or that. So, we know, okay, he was a pagan. It’s obvious from his writings he’s an educated man. He knows a lot about history. He can talk about laws with knowledge. He knows a good bit about philosophy.

02:02 - He’s kind of very anti-philosophy, but he knows a lot about it. He knows both Greek and Latin. He lived in Carthage in North Africa. He was in Rome at times, but most of his writing, most of his life that we know him, he’s in Carthage, North Africa. Most of his writings are like 190 to 210. It’s about a 20 year window there, but boy, he turned out a lot during during that time. So we have a lot of his writings then, but what are some common threads you see of certain things he emphasized as in quote, what would be a hill he would die on? Now before I get there let me just give a little bit more because then I think that answer will make more sense. I was gonna read a quote. This is from Philip Shaft the church historian who has a thick volume on the Pre-Nicene writers. He says this. It’s fairly favorable.

I wasn’t sure 03:02 - what he would have to say about Tertullian, but he says, “Tertullian is the father of Latin theology, and Latin church language, and one of the greatest men of Christian antiquity. We know little of his life except what is derived from his books, and from the brief notice of Jerome in his list of illustrious Christians, but few writers have impressed their individuality so strongly in their books as this African father. In this respect as well as in others, he resembles Saint Paul and Martin Luther.” Now he would have had an issue being grouped with Martin Luther I am sure, but he would not have wanted to have been compared to Paul, but I think what Shaft is meaning both Paul and Luther had these strong, fiery kind of personalities, and Tertullian is that way. His writings. He is not gentle on anything. He’s not lackadaisical. If he writes about something, he’s full of passion when he writes. We did a book of just his writings years ago.

It’s 04:07 - called A Glimpse at Early Christian Church life. It’s not in print now because people didn’t like it because he grates you. I mean he doesn’t say things nicely. I mean he just puts them out there. If you’re not already convinced, he’s going to step on your toes. So yeah that book didn’t prove to be as popular, so we finally let it go out of print. But yeah, he’s important because he’s maybe the first or certainly the first prominent Christian to write in Latin. Before him they wrote in Greek.

I mean like the New Testament - I mean Paul writes in Greek even when he’s writing to the 04:46 - Romans. Tertullian realizes - well particularly North Africa - most of them are Latin speakers down there, and it’s like, okay, Christianity can’t be locked in the Greek language. I mean the Bible had been translated into Latin by then, but most writing was still in Greek, so he has to invent a vocabulary. A lot of these words - they’re Greek words. They are words that don’t exist outside the New Testament, so how do you come up? You have to invent a word. English having been influenced so much by Latin. His words have influenced us. I mean the classic example would be “trinity.” He’s the one who coined that word. Oh, okay. I didn’t know that. Yeah, in Latin - “trinitas,” and that’s where we get “trinity,” and it’s one of the things that makes his writing a little easier to read. I mean if he wasn’t so grating on you.

When I 05:43 - had first started reading the early Christian writings, I struggled. I mean they were for me very difficult. I’d never read anything like that, and I remember trying Irenaeus, trying different people, and I would go for maybe a week or something. It’s like, oh, this is torture. I finally pick up Tertullian. It’s like, okay, he’s pretty easy to understand. He thinks the way that we westerners do, and very logical the way he lays things out. Some books say he was an attorney. There’s no evidence of that at all, but he would have made a good one. He’s good at argumentation. Very logical when he lays out his argument.

This guy would have been ready to die on lots of hills. I think everything was for him a do or die kind of thing. It’s amazing. He did not die as a martyr. I mean if anybody should have - I mean just because he doesn’t worry about stepping on people’s toes, and what I mentioned about being a Latin writer. He’s not real speculative. He tends to be meat and potatoes kind of writer. The perfect contrast between him and Origen. Origen loves to speculate, loves to “what if?” “What about this?” in his theology. Now they’re both equally orthodox. They would teach the same things on the basics.

Origen loved to say, okay, 07:08 - here is what the churches define. Now all this out here that the church hasn’t defined, let’s talk about that. The what ifs. You don’t see much of that in Tertullian. Origen also loved to when reading the Old Testament see prophetic types. I mean we all see that there’s a lot of legitimate prophetic types in the Old Testament like Abraham and Isaac. Picturing the father and the son when he was offering him up. Well, Origen in every incident I mean he sees a prophetic tie. He sees a prophetic type here. You don’t see a lot of that in Tertullian beyond what all of the early Christians would have seen, and talked about, so he’s very practical. His big one of course is his love for Jesus Christ, and his desire to represent Christianity to the pagans particularly the educated pagans. Probably his apology is the most famous. He explained what Christians believed, what the pagans were saying about them, all the false rumors, and what was true, what wasn’t. Why Christianity makes the most sense beyond everything.

He coined 08:21 - the phrase - well it’s often quoted differently than the way he put it. He said, “The blood of the martyrs is seed.” You know it’s often quoted as “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” But he said, “The more you mow us down, the more we grow. The blood of martyrs is seed.” But his apology - now it’s not brash. I would say it is not designed to irritate, but he does an excellent job, and when I read that, boy, it just was such a glimpse into life back there in the second century. The year 190, 95.

What the pagans are believing, what they’re doing, 08:57 - and how they’re looking at Christians, and then what the Christians are actually doing. That was to me just a really classic work. So he was ready to die on that hill, but he never did. Okay. Another favorite theme of his. It’s not that he believed any different. Some of the writers like Shaffy says, well, he was kind of as inclined as an ascetic. Well, I would say no more than Origen or any of the others. It’s just that he hammers on it maybe a little bit more, but things like staying separate from the world. I mean everything dealing with luxury they would have all taught. The whole church would have taught this, but he definitely goes after some of these issues where Christians are beginning to compromise. He would have made a good Anabaptist. Okay, you do not compromise. Boy, here’s the line, and for example, he makes a list of all the different professions. He’s not making a standard like you cannot be this.

He’s just saying how are you going 10:05 - to be a Christian and be like a school teacher in a public school? Okay, so they bring in the pagan gods. What are you going to do? Okay, they have this day when they’re supposed to talk about this god. What are you going to do as a Christian? What about when they’re all wearing this certain flower or something because it’s such and such a day? What are you going to do? And he points out a lot of things like that where maybe some Christians were saying, well, okay, you know I’ll kind of just go along, stay in the background, whatever. So he’s a very much no compromise, and like I say as Anabaptists, yeah, we would fit in pretty good with his line of thinking. He’s equally strong against heretics. Marcion. He wrote five books. Now a book would have been the length of a scroll.

When they say a book, that’s what they’re usually talking about. Marcion - sometimes he’s grouped with the gnostics. Sometimes he’s not. The gnostics would have believed they had all of this special knowledge, and stuff that isn’t in the Bible, and all that. Okay, Marcion didn’t claim that, but one of the aspects of gnosticism was they said the God of the Old Testament’s not the God of the New Testament. This age-long issue of how do you harmonize the Old Testament, and the New? I mean in the Old your war, and people are swearing oaths, and all that, and you get to the New Testament, and war is forbidden. You don’t swear oaths. There’s no divorce, and all that.

You know people like Calvin said, well, there isn’t any difference. The Old Testament morality is still our morality, and if you think that the Sermon on the Mount says something different than what Moses said, you’re misreading the Sermon on the Mount. Well, that’s not correct. There is that clear difference which the gnostics saw, but their solution was okay, that must have been a different god then. It’s too different. Well, boy, that creates all kinds of problems. Well, yeah, so now you’ve got two gods. Now they viewed him as some kind of lesser being not anything at the same level as the true God, but then all these prophecies that are in the Old Testament.

So you’re saying these are from a different god, 12:09 - but they’re prophesying about Christ. So Tertullian takes that, and he really hammers Marcion, and so what do you do with this? And Marcion is having to explain, well, no, Isaiah’s not really talking about Jesus, and all of this, and you’re having to throw all of this stuff out, but wait a minute. Paul then quotes Isaiah, and so now what do you do? And Jesus quotes him. Well, then Marcion had to play with the New Testament, and take out these quotes from the Old, and just all kinds of stuff. So Tertullian had no patience with that. Now Marcion was put out of the church. I mean he’s not somebody in the church. He’s a heretic, but Tertullian. He gathered a lot of followers. Tertullian goes after him. I mentioned he coined the word “trinity.” Okay, the work in which he coined it was a work against what’s in theology known as modalism. We know it today usually as oneness.

The people who believe that Jesus and the Father are the same - one and 13:05 - the same. You know it’s Jesus is God. The Father’s God. Yeah, there’s just one God. Sometimes, He calls himself Jesus. Sometimes He calls Himself the Father. Well that’s heresy, and Tertullian wrote a whole tract on that which is extremely valuable because in the process of pointing out their errors, he’s explaining what the church believes, and so it’s one of our clearest, earliest explanations of the Trinity. In fact I read that. You know my background is Jehovah’s Witness, and so the Trinity was always something like, man, when I left the Witnesses, okay, I’ll accept this, but it makes no sense. Well, then when I read Tertullian, it’s like, oh, now I get it! Man, this makes sense, and so it’s a really to me valuable writing. Now there was a hill he not literally, but spiritually died on, and that was Montanism.

Now, that was a movement that started in the late 100s, late second century. It was this man in Phrygia which would be modern-day Turkey. His name was Montanus, and he claimed to be a prophet, and he would prophesy. He would go into these ecstatic trances, and do these prophecies. Which the church didn’t disbelieve in prophets, but they were going to put it to a close test, but now that manner of prophesying was not something Christian prophets ever did.

14:32 - The church didn’t just immediately reject him, but they sent a group of leaders there to kind of look at the thing, and there were two prophetesses with him, and apparently they made all kinds of prophecies about the end of the world, and the New Jerusalem was going to come down there in Phrygia, and all this, and of course nothing ever happened. Well, Tertullian’s temperament, you’d think that would be the last kind of group he would be attracted to, but for some reason, he was really attracted to them. When he first got interested, they were part of the churches. These were people within the church. Eventually the church rejected the whole thing, and I guess they were put out of the church at some point. When he got interested, it was more just like a movement within. He still went to the same church as everyone else.

It was just something - kind of his 15:20 - personal following. Later in his life, his last three or four writings, he has really gone over whole hog with them, and now he’s criticizing the general mass of Christians - the orthodox Christians, and he calls them the natural man. You know what Paul talks about the natural man versus the spiritual man, the Greek there is actually the soulful man or the soulish man. So he calls the church that. He doesn’t say they’re not Christians. It’s just that they’re not spiritual. We’re the spiritual ones. As strict as the early church was, the Montanists were even stricter, so that would have appealed to his temperament - that aspect of it. Through his writings we know a lot about them because we see what they were saying not from their enemies, but from somebody who’s writing as one. As far as we know, he died as a Montanus.

I mean they 16:13 - were orthodox in their theology. It’s not like he wasn’t a Christian or anything. They were one of those movements that had some good aspects to them, and they were off base on other things, and despite that turn at the end of his life, he was very well respected. Like I say, his writings were read. He’s mentioned by a couple of them of the later writers. Eusebius mentions him. Jerome. So we know he was respected, and you know read. He probably in the Latin speaking Roman world of the fourth, fifth, and going on to the Middle Ages, he would have been one of the most widely read early Christians because in the west hardly anyone would have read Greek after say the year 400 or 500.

So Latin would have been what they were all reading, and so here you have this Latin writer. So I’m very curious then, how did he view the Scripture? Can you give some examples of how he read the Bible, and ways he interpreted it? I’m not going to be able to give you an example, but I can tell you if that’s good enough. I’ve told you a little bit about the contrast between him and Origen. So he’s not inclined to go off on speculative things. Like the rest of the church he would be so representative of all of them.

17:40 - Whatever the Bible teaches, he takes it literally. He takes it seriously, and we do it. We don’t try to argue around it. We don’t try to come up with what about this? Well, what about that? No, Jesus said do it, so you do it. In a right way. I mean he’s not off base on that in the least bit, but he would really be a nice representative because of like I say being a Latin writer, being a little bit more readable. His writings are a very important witness to the early Latin Bibles. Okay this would have been before the Latin Vulgate that became the dominant Bible during the Middle Ages, and it’s valuable for also comparing manuscripts about say how did the Bible originally read? Because 95 percent of everything in every manuscript is the same.

The differences 18:30 - are usually very minor, but yeah, sometimes you wonder, how did it read? Well, when you have a very early Latin translation, it gives you a clue. Whatever they translated from this is how that read way back in the year 190. So his writings give us some important evidence that way plus some of his writings are in Greek, so it’s nice that he understands both languages, and he can discuss some of the differences, and you could say now the Greeks say this, but you know now we Latins say… Well I’ll give you one, and boy, this is a little deeper, but the Greek word in the Lord’s prayer. We say, give us this day our daily bread, and the Greek word is epiousion. Okay, it doesn’t mean daily. It doesn’t even remotely mean daily. Usia means substance or nature. Epi means more than or super. So it’s like give us our supernatural bread. It’s a word.

19:25 - There isn’t an English equivalent, and there wasn’t a Latin equivalent. Now he didn’t do the Latin Bible. Whoever did it is like I don’t know how to translate this, so they put daily, and that’s where we get “give us this day our daily bread,” but that’s not what Jesus said. Now, I’m not advocating well let’s start changing how we pray the Lord’s prayer. It’s hard to change something that’s been that ingrained for you know so long, but now Jerome actually in the Latin Vulgate - I think it’s in Luke - he puts daily bread, and then in the other one, he does put super-substantial - more than the natural - or whatever. He has to create a Latin word for it. You could say supernatural, but I don’t know if that would be the best, but that would be the closest maybe in English without creating a word for it, so that would be an example where it’s neat him knowing both languages, and he can talk about that when he talks about the Lord’s prayer.

It would have never crossed my mind until I got into 20:19 - all of that, and it’s like, wow, this is neat having early witnesses in both Greek and Latin. So giving us the background and some of the things he taught, and the things he analyzed in his writings, in your opinion how can Tertullian contribute to present day conversations? What does he bring to us today that’s of value in our own walks as believers? A lot of what I’ve said would bear on that. I would say if you were going to take one early Christian writer - you know a Pre-Nicene writer - to get a window into early Christianity, into the primitive church, probably Tertullian. If you’re going to pick any single individual, he would probably be - if I had to pick one - it would probably be him not because he’s necessarily my favorite character or that, but he deals with so many practical issues - war, political involvement, the head covering, modest dress, entertainment. I talked about the Lord’s prayer, baptism - I mean all of these practical kinds of things, so when you’re reading Tertullian, you’re reading a lot about daily life among Christians during those early centuries.

To me it’s so valuable for the Church today to have that kind of witness that 21:39 - is like I say things are laid out logically. You can read it. I’m not saying it’s light reading or that sort of thing, but it is readable if you’ve got let’s say a high school reading level or beyond. For me it was a wake-up call. Not just him, but all of the early Christians of, hey, Jesus meant what he said. They would have said, yeah, He did mean everything He said. Well, I mean everyone would say that today, but I mean they really meant it. Jesus said this.

He means 22:05 - it, and Tertullian would be such a spokesman for that viewpoint. He’s our Lord. What he says this we need to do, and we don’t start getting into gray areas. Well, maybe it’s okay. I fudge here, and I fudge here a little bit, and he would say, no, we don’t, and he was absolutely right because then after Constantine, then everybody is fudging, and then pretty soon the whole institutional church just kind of melds into the world. So the commentary that I’ve just worked on Matthew, I quote Tertullian. I quote him most next to Origen. Origen the most. Tertullian the second of the Pre-Nicene writers.

Like I say, he’s usually saying something that this really helps on this 22:48 - subject. Some of the other writers when I read the whole paragraph, I see what they’re saying. It maybe helped me as a commentator. Okay, I understand how they’re understanding this, but to quote this, to include a quote from them that would help my reader, they’re not very quotable that way. Usually Tertullian, yeah, he’s very understandable. You know I can pull a quote from him, and yeah, I think my reader will be able to grasp this.

As one of the more famous 23:13 - early Christians the church today owes him a lot, and should be a lot more familiar with him. So maybe it’s something where we can encourage, hey, if you want to start reading the early Christians, maybe this would be a good place to start. I would say if you’re going to start anywhere you probably couldn’t do much better. His Apology. It’s very readable. It covers a whole lot. You learn about their Christian beliefs, but you learn about the pagan world. You learn about how Christians lived. Great work for that type of insight. That’s really interesting. I’ve personally never read any of his works, so now this is like, oh, I should probably do that.

23:59 - Just when you were gonna read the Matthew commentary, now instead you’re gonna go home and read Tertullian. Okay, actually I’m pretty sure I’ll read your book first. I’m kidding. Wow. Thanks so much for sharing, David. This was very enlightening actually. Wonderful. .